Drones Reportedly Hit Russian Tax Service Data Center in Gorodets

Ukrainian drones reportedly attacked a Russian Federal Tax Service data center in Gorodets, in Nizhny Novgorod region, overnight on October 23, according to Ukrainian volunteer Serhiy Sternenko, Meduza and Interfax-Ukraine, though the damage and any service outage are unconfirmed.

Meduza cited the Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ for the attack and said three people were injured in Gorodets. The Gorodets district administration said only that drone debris fell in the city and briefly halted transport. Gwara Media wrote that Governor Gleb Nikitin reported 19 Ukrainian drones downed over the region, and that debris damaged a school and an infrastructure facility. Gwara said it could not independently verify what was hit or how badly. Russian authorities had not commented on the data center itself.

Why the Gorodets Tax Data Center Matters

Sternenko wrote on Facebook that the site is one of two key data centers for the Russian tax service, which run in a geo-distributed configuration and hold state registries and tax databases. Militarnyi, a Ukrainian defense outlet, repeated that description and said the full extent of the damage was still being assessed. Sternenko claimed the strike could take several Russian state digital systems offline. That is his claim; no report seen by Voltgrid shows an outage.

Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, told Ekho Moskvy, as quoted by Meduza, that the tax service runs two duplicate data centers: one in Dubna in the Moscow region and one in the Nizhny Novgorod region. He said they hold tax data, civil registry records and a registry of legal entities, and possibly cadastral data. Klimarev argued that repeated strikes on such sites could "bring down the entire tax system." The pairing is the reason one hit does not by itself mean an outage. Other Russian accounts cited by Gwara and Kyiv Post disagree on where the second site is.

Mutual Strikes on Data Centers Since September

For data-center operators and investors, the strike is another sign that facilities are now direct targets in the war. Meduza reported that Ukraine's armed forces have attacked Yandex data centers three times since mid-October, as well as sites belonging to Sberbank and VK, and that Russia has also struck Ukrainian data centers. Gwara Media described a campaign of mutual attacks on data centers since September.

On the Ukrainian side, Voltgrid reported that GigaCenter Kyiv was damaged in a Russian attack on October 20, a night after Datagroup lost a facility. The Gorodets site matters differently: it is state infrastructure that stores government records, so the effect of a lasting outage would fall on public services, not on commercial colocation tenants.

What Is Still Unconfirmed About the Damage

Nobody has confirmed which buildings at the Gorodets site were hit, whether servers or power systems were damaged, or whether tax systems were disrupted. Russian officials have named no target and attributed the injuries and damage to falling debris. Kyiv Post reported that authorities in Gorodets introduced restrictions after the reported damage to the data center. Watch for a statement from the Federal Tax Service on service availability, and for imagery that shows the damage.